which fully lived up to its civic role. Universities were fortunate to be spared the full impact of austerity – this was visited on their students in the form of significantly higher fees and loans. That story has still to be played out. Some universities took this as a sign of their intrinsic importance and invested the additional funding generated solely in themselves. Others, such as Newcastle, who were more enlightened, recognised the importance of maintaining the fabric of their local communities and invested in supporting them. I was very pleased to chair the Civic University Commission in 2019, which explored this vital civic role. Professor John Goddard was my deputy and a very valued contributor.
The timeliness of this book lies in the choices confronting the current government in dealing with the cost of COVID-19. The Prime Minister has set his face against another round of austerity but there are powerful political voices on his own side calling for just this instead of the tax rises being mooted by his Chancellor Rishi Sunak. The key decision-makers in government would do well to read this book before making their final decisions.
Islands of hope in a sea of despair: civil society in an age of austerity
Simin Davoudi, Mel Steer, Mark Shucksmith and Liz Todd
Introduction
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times … it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. (Dickens, 1859: 1)
Charles Dickens opens his most political novel, A Tale of Two Cities, with these words. Nearly two centuries later, we cannot but agree with his suggestion that, ‘In short, the period was … like the present period’ (Dickens, 1859: 1). Such entangling of hope and despair not only defines our everyday life experiences; it is also echoed in the intellectual dilemma that is at the heart of this book. From the outset, we were searching for ‘hope in the dark’ (Solnit, 2004), with the ‘dark’ being austerity policies and their implications for people and places, and ‘hope’ being civil society’s responses to them. By the time the manuscript was ready for submission (in spring 2020), the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic was in full swing. While a full analysis of its effects is premature and beyond the scope of this chapter, we cannot but reflect on it where appropriate, especially in the conclusion. The juxtaposing of hope and despair does not suggest that hope is an unqualified positive attribute. On the contrary, as Ernst Block (1986 [1954–59]: 56) suggests, ‘fraudulent hope is one of the malefactors, even enervators, of the human race, concretely genuine hope is its most dedicated benefactor’, defining the latter as ‘informed discontent’ with the status quo and a call for action. So, for us, hope is that which allows us to imagine an alternative future and strive to achieve it. This is particularly apt in relation to the COVID-19 crisis and the limited preparedness for tackling it. The aim of this chapter is to engage with a number of critical questions that arise from the interplay of hope and despair, such as:
•Should we celebrate the growing contributions from voluntary sector and charitable organisations as the best of times for a flourishing civil society, or should we reproach the decline of public services as the worst of times for a diminishing welfare state?
•Should we embrace civil society initiatives as a mark of resistance to neoliberal policies, or should we repel them for mopping up the consequences of such policies?
•Do civil society responses to austerity offer genuine or false hope?
•Will the flames of their actions burn strongly enough to withstand the harsh winds of neoliberal austerity and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic?
In engaging with these questions, the chapter unpacks two core concepts that run throughout: austerity and civil society. In doing so, particular attention is paid to the North East of England in the context of the pre-COVID-19 policy landscape in the UK. This focus provides both an illustrative example of the implications of austerity measures and civil society roles, and the contextual setting (along with Chapter 2: ‘The North East of England’) for the case-study chapters in this volume.
Neoliberal austerity as ‘the worst of times’
The collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2007 paved the way for the largest, widest and deepest financial crisis in living memory. It revealed the inherent contradictions in the global capitalist economy, as well as the drastic consequences of excessive deregulation of the financial markets for social equality and political democracy. The financial crash was followed by the bailing out of the failing banks with a huge amount of public money, and one of the worst economic recessions in Britain. The then Labour government’s response was to introduce a set of fiscal stimuli, which was promptly withdrawn by the subsequent Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition government in 2010 and replaced with a wave of drastic austerity policies that continued until 2020, when it was, perhaps temporarily, suspended by the Conservative government, mainly in response to the pandemic and its economic contagions.
The dictionary definition of ‘austerity’ refers to the ‘difficult economic conditions created by government measures to reduce public expenditure’ (Oxford English Dictionary). In this definition, reducing public expenditure is invoked as the only ‘natural’ solution to economic problems. Other economic solutions such as increasing corporate taxes are not considered. The definition, maybe inadvertently, depoliticises austerity as an economic necessity rather than a neoliberal political choice (Mattie and Salour, 2019) – a choice based on an economic rationality that has recently been further boosted by highly acclaimed economists (notably, Alberto Alesino). They suggest that by cutting welfare spending, taxes will go down, leading to an increase in the money available to private investors, whose increased wealth will eventually trickle down and reach everyone else. So, those who have disproportionately suffered from the cuts simply need to be patient. According to these economic rationalities, what matters is the effect of austerity on aggregate gross domestic product (GDP)1 figures rather than the differential impact on different social groups. While they ask the question of when austerity works and when it does not, they shy away from asking for whom austerity works.
David Kynaston (2010) makes an intriguing comparison between post-2010 and post-Second World War austerity, and argues that ‘austerity was a hard sell in the 40s. Today it’s harder still.’ He argues that the four conditions that enabled popular assent to post-Second World War austerity are not present in the contemporary political climate. These conditions are: ‘shared purpose’, ‘hope’, ‘confidence in the political class’ and ‘equity of sacrifice’. While recognising the contextual differences between now and the 1950s, we argue that the presence or absence of these conditions is largely the manifestation of different ideological approaches to austerity. These conditions are discussed one by one, with reflections also made regarding the post-COVID-19 implications.
The post-war sense of ‘shared purpose’ was invoked by the necessity of fighting off fascism and collectively responding to the devastations and destructions of the war. Today, as Kynaston (2010) suggests, there is no similar
